


The Time They Fucking Lost Fucking Watney

by thehaikubandit



Series: A Small Step For Man, A Kick in the Face for a Giant Monster [4]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013), The Martian - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Puns, Multi, You Have Been Warned, and terrible star wars jokes, it's ok he doesn't die, watney rocks up months late with no starbucks because he was lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 22:39:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9569840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehaikubandit/pseuds/thehaikubandit
Summary: The final part to my Pacific Rim/Martian crossover. The title sums it up, they lose Watney. Twice.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry this is so late, but I hope you all enjoy it!

Mark Watney woke up with sun on his face, sand under his back and waves crashing onto his legs. He promptly turned to his side and threw up copious amounts of sea water.

“Fuck,” he said.

It had been a routine training exercise. Wasn’t that always the way? They never seemed to go any way but disastrous. If someone suggests a routine training exercise, run like hell in the other direction.

The point of the exercise was water survival. Drowning was the number one cause of death for jaeger pilots. Something NASA reminded them every time they got into the ocean.

The exercise, aka, make six pilots swim in a faintly radioactive ocean was called off when a cyclone had hit much faster than expected. While they packed up and made for land Mark had been blown overboard. The crew had looked for him as long as they could before the cyclone forced them back to Fiji. It was six days before they could start to look again.

The PPDC started a search effort, but three weeks later a category four Kaiju made landfall at Cape York. With increasingly reduced resources they had no choice but to stop the search. Mark Watney was presumed dead, and went down as another pilot lost to the Pacific Ocean.

The cyclone had swept Mark a long way from the boat and he had landed on an island. It was tiny, barely above the surface of the water. A few square hundred metres of sand was all that allowed it to be called anything more than a seamount. There was barely any vegetation, just a bit of grass, Mark, some junk that had washed up with him, and a very angry looking seagull.

As he threw up what seemed to be most of the ocean, he reflected that for the second time, he’d been lost by his team mates.

-

It was Vogel’s birthday and they were given 24 hours leave in Seattle. They decided to treat him to a massive bar crawl. It had been that sort of year. Five hours in, they lost Mark and left him sleeping under a table.

When the bar staff dragged him out at 4am, they asked him who to call.

“Ghostbusters,” said Mark promptly. They tried again. For some reason they didn’t believe him when he spouted off the names of the PPDC and NASA command, with a few famous jaeger pilots thrown in for good measure. When he passed out a second time, they gave up and checked his wallet. Upon finding a PPDC card, the barman was at a loss and called the only PPDC number he knew. The emergency hotline.

“You’re through to the Seattle Kaiju Emergency Line,” said a woman. “Please state your emergency.”

“Hi,” he said. “I’ve got an unconscious drunk guy here who seems to work for you? I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“Um,” said the woman on the phone. “Please hold.” She was back a moment later. “Ok, I don’t know what to do with him either, but my shift ends in twenty minutes. I could come and get him. Where are you anyway?”

“The Mars Bar,” he told her.

“Oh, I know it,” she said. “I’ll be there in an hour or less.”

45 minutes later a woman in a small car arrived outside the Mars Bar.

“Hi,” she said. “My name’s Mindy, I’m guessing you’re waiting for me to collect this guy?”

The barman helped her get Watney into the front seat of her car, handed her Mark’s wallet and left. Mindy looked at his drivers license and called security.

“Hi, Mindy Park from the emergency team. I need the most important on call number you have.”

Venkat Kapoor had not been pleased to be woken at five in the morning because Mark Watney was drunk. They were all given cards with “If found please return to Mitch Henderson” and a contact number, just in case it happened again.

-

Sadly for Mark, he didn’t have the card with him, and even if he did, he didn’t have a phone. He didn’t even have the traditional coconut tree to set on fire.

His first concern was shade. With the dehydration he was currently suffering, he needed to avoid losing more water.

When he felt he could move, he stood. Falling back to the ground, he realised that this was possibly over ambitious. Also he appeared to have broken his ankle.

Crawling over to the junk along the tide line, Mark inspected what he could use. There really wasn’t much. But there was some drift wood, plastic bags, broken coral and a large, mostly flat piece of corrugated iron. He figured someone had lost their roof in the storm.

Mark took off his outer drive suit, under-shirt, and boots. He used a nearby piece of coral to rip a long piece off the shirt. He then tied a branch of the driftwood to his ankle as a splint and put on his new, stylish crop top. Mark thought about balancing the metal sheet on some sticks to make a shelter and thought better off it. The last thing he needed was a concussion. Instead he simply stuck it at a right angle to the sand, burying the base as best he could. He crawled into the shade on one side and fell back to sleep.

He woke the second time to the best view of the milky way he had ever seen in his entire life. There was something to be said for being stuck in the middle of nowhere. He was hungry, and thirsty. Both his ankle and his head throbbed, and his skin was warm even though the night was now cool. Mark figured he’d look like a lobster in the morning.

Sitting up, he decide to risk standing again. This time he used a driftwood branch as a staff, and held it tightly. Scanning the horizon he saw a single, tiny black dot against the starry expanse. With luck it would be a bigger island. Mark knew if he wanted to survive to be rescued he’d need food and water. The island he was on held neither.

Well he had a large sheet of corrugated iron. If he could find a rock it might be possible to make it into some kind of boat or raft for him to reach the next island. And the plastic bags could be used to catch fresh water if it rained. Mark hobbled around until he found them and tucked them into his waistband. There was no way he was losing those. If he could chance a swim in the morning, and the island he thought he saw was an island and not a passing kaiju, he might survive this.

Closing his eyes again, Mark tried to rest and thought about his crew and his family. He had to get back. There was no way he was letting anything short of a category four kaiju take him down.

When the sun rose Mark saw it was indeed an island on the horizon, and not a kaiju. A faint smudge of green, but a dark green that made him hope for trees, and even people. His ankle was feeling a little better. He decided to poke it.

Mark screamed. Nobody heard him, which said a lot about how alone he was. It had been a very loud scream.

Gritting his teeth and regretting not washing up with morphine or something similar Mark gently felt first his injured ankle, and then the non-injured one, comparing the two. The bones felt similar, although his injured ankle was incredibly swollen. There was a chance it was only a sprain, or a minor fracture at worst.

With a goal in mind, get off this fucking island, Mark decided to take a tiny swim. He couldn’t see anything on the island to shape the metal with short of his hands, but there might be rocks beneath the surface. Seamounts were good that way.

Mark waded out into the water, and tentatively stuck his head below the surface, ignoring the salt stinging his eyes. He saw brilliant colour with corals and fish, and several rocks lying between the coral. Mark stuck his head up, took a deep breath and dived. It took him three attempts to tug one free, and by the time he got back to shore he was pissed off at the entire world, and especially gravity.

Mark was tired, thirsty and sore. Taking out his frustration by bashing a sheet of metal with a rock helped a little, but not entirely. Eventually he had something resembling a canoe. Saying goodbye to his pile of sand and coral, Mark set off, using his helmet to bail out the canoe as best he could.

The island Mark had seen was a lot smaller than he had thought. This was helpful in that it was closer, but it meant that there were only a few trees. Coconut trees. The canoe was sinking badly and it wasn’t going to make it, but Mark had seen the coconut trees and there was nothing getting between him and a chance to quench his thirst.

The first drink of coconut water was the best thing Mark had ever tasted.

Mark named the second island Naboo. The prequels may have been terrible, but hey, it was a paradise for him. He would have named it Scarif, it looked similar, but he knew how that movie ended, and Mark would rather risk a whiny jedi than death. There were five coconut trees, grass and the most beautiful big heart shaped leaves Mark had ever seen. Taro.

-

When asked how he survived, Mark joked that it came down to coconuts, taro, seaweed, fish and littering. The plastic bags had helped him trap water, and the rest he managed to gather. The trees even saved him when he was finally rescued, he managed to set them on fire to attract attention from a passing fishing ship. Mark cried waving the boat into shore, seeing the first humans he’d seen in nearly a year and a half. Coconuts only had so much they could do in a conversation, although to their credit they made excellent listeners.

Mark had been confused what a fishing vessel was doing in the Pacific. Since the breach had opened it had been a bad idea to go near the ocean. That should have been his first clue. The dead fish that had washed up on the island several months earlier should probably have been another.

A lot had happened in the year and a half. The breach had been closed, the kaiju were gone and he had been declared dead. From all accounts the funeral had been touching.

He landed in LAX to a storm of publicity before being whisked away for medical tests, debriefs and a chance to see his parents. He met with the crew as well, and slowly grew used to the company and noise of others again.

One of the best moments was when Mark saw Beck and Johanssen. And their baby. After the slightly teary embraces Mark found out his name, and laughed that anyone had decided to name a child after him.

The medical staff were concerned about his radiation exposure, eating both fish and seaweed from the Pacific, but after a great deal of poking and blood samples they let Mark go home. To his delight Beck and Johanssen had a house in the suburbs, where they had moved to be near his parents. It had a garden he began to fill, and between a baby and his new seedlings, not to mention the people he loved, Mark was happier than he had been in a long time.


End file.
